Elk Kloner

Rich Skrenta claims to have written the world's first computer virus--on an Apple. In 1982 Skrenta coded what he called "Elk Cloner," a virus that spread via floppy disks in the days before computers had hard drives, or for that matter, any security measures. The virus infected thousands of machines, but was harmless: It merely displayed a poem across the user's screen. An excerpt: "It will get on all your disks/It will infiltrate your chips/Yes, it's Cloner!"